essay 19

Beauty isn’t all about just nice loveliness, like. Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming. So I think beauty in that sense is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life. - John O'Donohue

Her existence, like her beauty and real worth, was intrinsically aesthetic, not physical or emotional. Veronica would be most comfortable, I remain convinced, as a human exhibit, motionless in the cool bright corner of a public hall, surrounded by a square of red velvet no-touch ropes, hearing only whispered voices and heels on tile.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

— John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

She was coming to look on men and women as fellow-survivors: well-dissemblers of their woes, who, with few signals of grief, had contained, assimilated, or put to use their own destruction. Of those who had endured the worst, not all behaved nobly or consistently. but all, involuntarily, became part of some deeper assertion of life.

— Shirley Hazzar